 My name is Ross Kelly, I'm a photo-based artist and I'm in the Low Residency MAA program in Emily Cotton. I did half a degree in geology, a degree in psychology, a diploma in photography, another diploma in art history and now this. So this is my first time in art school. I've never done an online course with an online component before, I've never done an intensive kind of residency period like they have in the summer. I chose the Low Residency program because I have a family and I have a practice that I didn't want to give up and I couldn't spend two years just pursuing that while other things were left aside. I also thought that it would kind of lead me into new directions and certainly with working with different materials and having the opportunity to work with different tools and learn new skill sets. That it would sort of lead me in new directions and it has. I'm not an online person, I'm not a particularly digital person. It was a tough one to learn and I still, to be honest, I still haven't quite figured out how to use my virtual studio. Well, virtual studio is important for getting your work out. You post your work on your virtual studio the night before, the day before, sometime before and you have a set time where everyone can log on to video conference at the same time and basically everyone gets a certain amount of time to have their work critiqued and it works like a normal critique except that the people looking at your work are all over the place. All really meaningful communication goes to Skype, whether you're talking to your instructor or whether you're having a group critique or we'll often call one another. You could be having a discussion at eight o'clock in the morning or you could be having a talk at ten o'clock at night and you just have to be prepared to be flexible in that way. Being sculptural is a lot more challenging to critique online than video work or photography. Sometimes the uncertainty plays well into the way it works because I think people tend to ask more questions than they would if they just had an object in front of them because they need help defining what they're looking at. The deal is where you have discussion boards, discussion threads. Of all the different things that go into the online experience, the writing one is probably the most challenging. It's really difficult at the beginning because you've got to decode the way a person writes before you can actually start to guess at what they're saying. Because your interactions take place in such a short space of time, such a focused space of time, you've got to be prepared for those interactions maybe a little bit better than you would be if you were going into class regularly. And you also need to be flexible. You also need to be able to make time to talk to people online when they're in different time zones and when they have different commitments to yours. But if you can do that, it can be a really successful program.